The present invention relates generally to large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system, and more particularly, to a method for improving pattern matching in a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system.
Pattern matching is one of the more computationally intensive aspect of the speech recognition process. Conventional pattern matching involves computing similarity measures for each acoustic feature vector in relation to each of the acoustic models. However, due to the large number of acoustic models, only a subset of acoustic models may be loaded into the available memory at any given time. In order to compute similarity measures for a given acoustic feature vector, conventional pattern matching requires a number of I/O operations to load and unload each of the acoustic models into the available memory space.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved method of pattern matching that reduces the number I/O operations associated with loading and unloading each acoustic model into memory.